The process of making shirt sleeve cuffs in the past has required a plurality of difficult alignment and sewing steps and has required skilled machine operators because of the multiple number of plies of outer cuff pattern parts and inner lining pattern parts required to form the cuff, and because the pattern parts are small and are easily misplaced. For example, a typical cuff making process required both the outer cuff panels and inner lining panel to be cut in the cutting room by die cutting or clicking, and the outer panels and liner panel were tagged in the cutting room and then transferred to the sewing stations in the sewing room. At the first sewing station an operator aligned the inner liner panel with a first cuff panel, folded the overlying edge of the cuff panel over an edge of the liner panel, and sewed through the fold to form a hem or Brighton roll in the cuff panel about the edge of the liner panel. The plurality of partially completed cuffs formed in this manner were connected in series by a chain stitch extending between adjacent ones of the partially completed cuffs and the partially completed cuffs were accumulated at the first sewing station.
After a bunch of outer cuff panels has been passed through the first sewing station to form a bunch of partially completed shirt cuffs, the bunch was transferred to a second sewing station where the second outer cuff panel was aligned in overlying relationship with the first cuff panel and folded about the hem of the first cuff panel, and the operator then stitched in a U-shaped path about an end of the fold and around the unstitched edges of the inner liner and cuff panels and over the other end of the fold to complete the cuff. The cuffs were again connected together by chain stitching as they left the sewing station, and when the batch of cuffs had passed through the second sewing station they were transferred to a subsequent work station where the cuffs were separated, everted, pressed, and stacked.
The old procedure required not only the cuff panels but the liner to be cut to shape in the cutting room so that a substantial amount of liner material as well as cuff panel material was wasted. Also, the slow processes of aligning the edges of cuff panels and liner panels were required at both the first and second sewing stations, and the sequence of the outer panels had to be maintained at both the first and second sewing stations so that one or both oeprators would not incorrectly match cuff panels in a cuff structure from different bunches of material or from different layers in a bunch and form cuff structures having mismatched colors.